PIYUSH PATEL

Intellectual Man of Mastery

BY CHRISTINE EDDINGTON PROPERTY PHOTOGRAPHY BY JUSTIN MIERS

The scene: late 1970s London. A young man furrows his brow as he studies a map of the United States, searching for his future. He’s looking for the most auspicious city for he and his wife to launch their new adventure and raise their two young boys, while pursuing their entrepreneurial American dreams. This visionary young man is father to Piyush Patel, whom you’ll meet shortly.

In a “Eureka!” moment, Patel’s father finds the perfect place: El Reno, Oklahoma.

“My dad saw that the two major highways in the United States, Hwy. 81 and Rt. 66, cross right here in El Reno. He decided that’s where we should go,” says Patel, whose own remarkable story sprang from his parents’ plucky decision. The Patel family opened a small hotel, a couple of blocks from that fateful crossroads. “My dad was literally like, ‘Let’s go to the middle of America. That’s where all the cars are going to pass.’”

Fantastical? Not if you’re a Patel. Father and son alike have the rare ability to evaluate data, toss in a dash of imagination and find enormous opportunity. They think fast and find solutions. Like moving to El Reno. It was from this little Oklahoma hometown that young Piyush began to dream.

His bedroom walls were covered with ingeniously repurposed pictures of sports cars. “Growing up, I really wanted car posters,” he remembers. But the family didn’t have funds for extravagances like that. “So my dad said, ‘What we can do is go to the library, and ask for the Car and Driver magazines that they’re going to throw away. And those can be your posters.’” And I remember thinking ‘One day, I’m going to have these sports cars.’” And he does. Six, including a McLaren, a Ferrari and a Lamborghini.

Clearly, one of Patel’s superpowers is harnessing the improbable. Need more evidence? Here’s the story of how he met Lisa, his wife of more than 25 years. For someone whose first entrepreneurial foray was digital illustration instruction for visual effects and animation, their meeting was remarkably … analog. Of course, it was in the ’80s.

“My wife and I were eighth grade pen pals back in the early ’80s,” he says, smiling. At the time, the OU-Nebraska football rivalry was a major thing, and Lisa is from Nebraska. “Her assignment for her writing classroom was to pick a school and write them a letter.” Lisa picked Norman on a map of Oklahoma, but then moved her finger a smidge to the left. For the second time in his young life, someone pointed to El Reno on a map and changed Patel’s life.

“There were three sections of eighth grade English, and I was in the section that got her letter. And the teacher said, ‘Alright, everybody write her back.’ So we all wrote her a letter … and she wrote me back, and I wrote her back. And we did that until we were freshmen in college. I’d never seen a picture of her. And I just remember that before I met her, I was talking to her on the phone and I hung up the phone and I looked at my buddy and I said, ‘I’m gonna marry this girl.’ And he goes, ‘You’re out of your mind.’” That buddy would be the best man at the Patels’ wedding.

Although his career has been staggeringly successful, money was never Patel’s driver. It’s part of what makes him such an interesting study. He launched his company, Digital-Tutors, during the dot-com heyday of the early aughts, unwittingly creating a delivery platform whose value soon made itself known, eventually outshining the teaching content.

At first, the company, which offered digital effects and illustration classes, mailed lessons to clients on DVDs, which was cumbersome and limited the company’s ability to grow. In 2000, with encouragement from a student, he posted the videos online and his company DigitalTutors soon became the world’s largest digital training library, used by global companies including Pixar, NASA, Microsoft and Dreamworks.

“We were like four years before YouTube. Little did we know we had built the first YouTube, right?” he asks. “But in reality, we were so concerned with the content that we were like, ‘No, no, people only want the content, not this platform.’” Of course, the realization soon struck that it was the streaming platform that was the real game-changer.

What happened next? Fast forward to 2014. “I get this call one day and the guy said, ‘Hey, we’d like to buy your company.’ And I distinctly remember saying, ‘It’s hard to buy something that’s not for sale’ … I had 42 full-time employees here in Oklahoma City, and 500 contractors all around the world.” Six weeks later, Patel had sold the company. “A lot of it was just the realization that if something was to happen to me, there was really no way for my wife to turn that equity into cash. She wouldn’t know how to run the company. My son was too young at the time, so I had no exit plan.”

Plus, the interested party, Pluralsight LLC, gave Patel 45 million excellent reasons to sell. Today, he pursues new dreams: “I work as a mentor and advisor for entrepreneurs at all stages in their careers. I help business leaders realize their own dreams, and I give them the tools to help make that possible,” he says.

As of this writing, the Patels have founded and sold a groundbreaking company, raised their son Nick, now a college student, built an exquisite home more akin to a luxurious mountain resort, bought a vineyard and produced their own house wines, plus they now live a stone’s throw from Patel’s parents, for whom he also built a home. Patel is also an award-winning author, sought-after motivational speaker and coach, and is now working toward a master’s degree in marriage and family therapy, after which he will pursue a Ph.D. in clinical psychology. “My goal is to open a practice where I exclusively work with founders and entrepreneurs and their families.” He’s got a slew of ideas, and he’s running full throttle into the future. •

ABOVE: 2,900-bottle capacity wine room with a Venetian plaster ceiling.

OPPOSITE: The Patels’ THX-certified multi-tiered Dolby Atmos theater room.